This Magazine articles from May 2008

This Magazine archives from May 2008

Potter mouth.(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... I subscribe to This for an alternative point of view on world events and politics, which is why I can't understand your publishing Andrew Potter's "A convenient untruth" (March/April). Potter uses precious space to reiterate what right-wing...

Cell sense.(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... I was interested to read Zoe Cormier's piece "Plastic unfantastic" (March/ April), and was shocked to learn that 35 percent of plastic produced in Canada every year is used to make packaging. Equally alarming is that 20 percent of the Canadian...

Garbage patches?(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... Re: "Plastic unfantastic" (March/April). I just finished reading an article online from the U.K. Independent that explains the Pacific garbage problem is twice the size you suggest. Specifically, there are two vortices (one east of Hawaii and...

Gifts that keep on giving.(Editorial)
May 1, 2008... THIS MAGAZINE is run by the Red Maple Foundation, a registered charity. We are not for profit, and if you give us money, we will issue you a tax receipt. While you, of course, get to support a cause you believe in. Close to half of our...

Farm folk, city folk: urban agriculture: coming soon to a backyard near you?(PROFILE)(City Harvest )(Organization overview)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] PAULA SOBIE is a new kind of farmer. A year and a half ago, the 34-year-old and her partner, Martin Scaia, 40, founded City Harvest in Victoria, B.C. The couple had never farmed before, but now have just under half...

Downstream disease: pollution may be causing high diabetes rates among Aboriginals.(EASILY MISSED)(persistent organic pollutants)
May 1, 2008... TOVA CRANE WAS 12 YEARS OLD when she went temporarily blind. "I woke up one morning and I just couldn't see," she recalls. She woke up again while doctors were giving her insulin. The vision loss only lasted the night, but she was diagnosed...

Be afraid of the dark.(WTF?)(a magazine advertising that can only been seen in the dark)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... It used to be possible to escape our ad-infested world by heading home and turning off the lights. No longer, thanks to a BMW ad printed on the April cover of Vice magazine that only shows up in the dark. While the ad execs get points for...

Five charities that are worth it.(LIST)(List)
May 1, 2008... IT'S A TOUGH WORLD out there for a charity. In Canada, you're competing against some 80,000 other organizations, and if you don't have the budget for a big, slick campaign it's easy to be overlooked. So we've decided to help the little guys out...

Charity by the numbers.(GRAPHIC)
May 1, 2008... CHARITIES ARE BIG BUSINESS in Canada. How big? In 2006, Canadians donated $8.5 billion to charity, equalling what we spent on beer. That much money could also pay America's Iraq war bills for 42 days-or ensure that the world's hungry are fed...

You're so money: gone are taboos around talking about wages.(WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ... NOT DISCUSSING YOUR WAGES?)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... FOR YEARS, like Aunt Gladys's moustache or Uncle Hank's first wife, wages were one of those things you just didn't talk about. But now that taboo is being discarded by a young workforce that has no problems telling partners, friends and, heck,...

Pay the writer! Why Canada's content producers need a union.(ARGUMENT)(Essay)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] YOU COULD SAY writing is in my DNA. I've been a freelance journalist for 14 years. These days I write for Hour Magazine and the Montreal Gazette on topics such as heirloom seed fairs and labour disputes. I love the...

Gimme shelter: banks profit in good times but in bad, we all share the pain.(ECONOMICS)
May 1, 2008... "Poor Canada--so far from God and so close to the United States." Although this quotation is recycled from the 19th-century Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, the sentiment still applies as U.S. financial turbulence threatens to do serious...

No biofoolin': it may sound great, but ethanol is all politics.(POLITICS)
May 1, 2008... Can you name one issue that every major political party in Canada and every single presidential candidate in the U.S. agrees on? Hint: it's not health care, it's not education and it's not Iraq. It's ethanol, blessed by all as a keystone...

It's a hard-knock life for ...? Why we're surprised when babies are abandoned.(LAW)
May 1, 2008... For a few days in Toronto in the winter of 2008, it was impossible to avoid the plaintive dark eyes and plump cheeks of the baby we would come to know as Angelica-Leslie. Strangers had to provide the name because no one seemed to know who she...

Libya: is it me you're looking for?
May 1, 2008... When an Arabized version of the Simpsons debuted on a Saudi television station two years ago, pop-culture commentator RICHARD POPLAK was so intrigued he began an odyssey to uncover other examples of North American taste translated and...

Whose burden? Two decades of government cuts to social spending have paralyzed the charities that Canada's poor depend on for survival. But there is hope on the horizon.
May 1, 2008... So noble to give yet so degrading to receive, charity contradicts the core ideas of a just society. Justice means everyone is equal and entitled to basic rights--not at the whim of a given volunteer, but as the responsibility of society as a...

Get your goat: images of cute, cuddly animals have replaced sad-eyed children in the latest campaigns to market charitable giving to Africa. But what does it really mean to buy a village a goat?(new way of marketing of charities, the Unwrapped campaign which features animals from Africa)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the 1970s and '80s, Sally Struthers hysterically wept over African children with big, sad eyes in TV ads for the Christian Children's Fund. Last year, Helena Bonham Carter held up a singing fish toy in an Oxfam ad...

Why won't you let me play? Is the Special Olympics discriminating against the kids it's supposed to help?
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When my sister Carol first started soccer at age eight she more closely resembled a pylon than a player. When she did move, it was to sidestep away from the ball. Picture that scene in Braveheart where a blue-faced...

It's easy to be a moralist when you're ugly.(FICTION & POETRY)(Short story)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Say something lovely," I said. "God, you are such an emotional wimp!" Dora said. "That's not lovely at all!" I would always start our telephone conversations by demanding a compliment or a lovely...

Big Bad Bannock.(FICTION & POETRY)(Poem)
May 1, 2008... BIG BAD BANNOCK When the tornado hit the flour mill the product moved like a quickened ghost and fell into the churning campside lake, which, thanks to severed gas lines and lightning was an inferno of toppled...

Praying Mantis Bake Sale.(FICTION & POETRY)(Poem)
May 1, 2008... PRAYING MANTIS BAKE SALE What is the weirdest thing? they ask. Honey is the weirdest thing. Who decided we were going to eat honey, saw it dripping hexagonal viscous golden and said: We shall eat what the bees made. ...

Cento for A Rat-Packer.(FICTION & POETRY)(Poem)
May 1, 2008... CENTO FOR A RAT-PACKER Bob Hope, the wisecracking street-corner thug-- I feel you very close to me. Moments later, the skipper of the schooner ascended and made his entrance like lavish origami animals...

Uncle: Forsaken.(FICTION & POETRY)(Poem)
May 1, 2008... UNCLE: FORSAKEN translated from "Een jongen" by F. L. Bastet At the concert --there was wild hair like the musicals once set in February. The night harem drove through, their songs rang in the...

Twelve Lines for Spring.(FICTION & POETRY)(Poem)
May 1, 2008... TWELVE LINES FOR SPRING It was raining hard. The threat of lightning hid chastised behind a cloud. A man and his limping dog investigated. They'd lost something in the weather. Both turned to me and said, "Why...

Fish.(FICTION & POETRY)(Poem)
May 1, 2008... FISH That one time we caught a fish silver scaled after the sound of your voice saving--this lake is dead not like when we were kids there are no more fish here-- And then the rod ...

Live from the North: Isuma.tv takes indigenous film online.(PROFILE)(Website overview)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IN 1981, Canadian Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk sold three of his soapstone carvings in Montreal and bought a video camera with the proceeds, bringing the new technology home to the Arctic. Today, 27 years, dozens...

Street theatre.(PLAY)(Uth Ink )(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] STARTING THIS MONTH, Canadians will be able to experience a play in its native setting, without any showtimes other than the moment at which they happen to pass by. Uth Ink is a partnership between the...

Basement sweet.(PRESS)(Emdash Book Publishing)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ALISA GORDANEER and Marc Christensen have two children, two cats, a smattering of chickens and, oh yes, a publishing house--all within the confines of their cozy home. The press's small size hasn't stopped it from...

Shopdrop and roll.(ART)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, in a supermarket in Montreal, Natalie Reis picks up an 89-cent can of peas and carrots. She pulls one of her original drawings--a grey-and-red sketch of birds in flight--out of her purse and wraps it around the can. She...

A Week of This.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 1, 2008... A Week of This Nathan Whitlock ECW Press [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ALTHOUGH TECHNICALLY ADULTS, few of the characters in Nathan Whitlock's A Week of This have finished growing up. Following seven consecutive days in the life of...

Sex and the fortysomething: Stacey May Fowles' free-love story puts things in perspective.(BOOKS)(Be Good)(Book review)
May 1, 2008... In probably the most finely realized small press novel to come out in Canada last year, Toronto writer Stacey May Fowles puts a small cast of twentysomething characters through the surprisingly painful sex and gender contortions of what should...

How low can it go? Reality TV turns 20.(TELEVISION)
May 1, 2008... This year marks a dubious milestone in the history of television: reality TV is celebrating its 20th birthday. The modern reality show debuted two decades ago when the Fox network first aired COPS to fill empty programming slots during the 1988...

One-blog wonder: how the internet has redefined the musical playing field.(WEB)
May 1, 2008... Cultural critic Chuck Klosterman once wrote that the internet is a very Marxist plane. By which he meant it's an unlimited, equal playing field, as the little cultural worker competes against big cultural capital. For musician Colin...

Till death do they part: weddings through the ages.(THEN & NOW)(Chronology)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Circa A.D. 28 A marriage feast at Cana in Galilee is the occasion of Jesus's first miracle: turning six large jugs of water into wine. Given the cost of contemporary weddings (see 2008), it's unfortunate this feat...